Aaron Dragushan 👋 Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

Phoenix, Arizona, Us

Everyone has unique talents and skills, but overwhelmed HR departments use automation based on titles+dates+keywords to cut 97% of applicants. This misses many "soft factors" but particularly how candidates will fit with the hiring team.We were the first to build a platform focused on candidate-team fit, but early COVID halted almost all hiring, and we didn't have the runway to last until it picked back up.Lessons learned: I should have hired more slowly, so we'd have more runway.

Phoenix, Arizona, Us

Simple concept - if you had a gift card you that didn't want, you could sell it to us. We'd mark it up a bit and sell it to someone who was going shopping at that store.We pioneered automated buy/sell transactions to increase inventory turns. That helped us overtake well-funded industry leaders, and at scale we were turning inventory for premier brands in as little as five hours. First-year revenues were $350k. 2 years later we hit $50M ARR and a strategic acquisition by RetailMeNot. It was a very hard grind, the odds were against us, and the whole team worked incredibly hard. Grateful. 🙏

Washington, Dc, Us

Inspired while waiting on hold for Verizon - why would humans wait on hold with computers? Computers should wait on hold with computers... and when the humans are ready we'll connect them! We saved people 3.5 million minutes waiting on hold.In 2011, TIME magazine named us a "Top 10 of Everything" app, along with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, HBO, ESPN, and Spotify. We were also featured in The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Wired.Lessons learned: I should have focused earlier on finding a business model. People didn't want to pay, and on the enterprise side we learned that this wasn't actually a pain point. They know you're on hold and they're ok with it. 😳🥲

SaaS business that helps people put web forms onto their websites.What went right: Ongoing recurring revenue is the best thing ever. This business enabled me to swing the bat again and again.Ultimately we exited as I didn't think online forms were a great long-term business, and I looked elsewhere for other businesses to start and grow. If we had instead re-written the codebase, it might have been a longer-term success.

We created the world's first real-time polling service. We could get you 500 responses within an hour to a simple question.What went right: It was pretty cool to watch a poll happen in front of your eyes.Lessons learned: We waited too long to launch, spending valuable time polishing the product and trying to make it perfect. As it turned out, the product format didn't allow for more questions, which means businesses weren't interested, but we should have found that out sooner.